The Hungry Ones

Or: Burn Out

“A house doesn’t need a ghost to be haunted.”

On a lonely stretch of road in upstate New York, there sits a house that was once a home for troubled girls. Something bad happened there, involving a group of girls, neglected, abused and turned monstrous and Joy (Janet Lo), a girl with an affinity for fire, turned the first, but not the last victim. Now that house has become the home of a family with a little girl. What could possibly go wrong? Pulled back by her tormentors, hungry for fresh flesh and fresh playthings, Joy feels bound again and again to try and rescue the new denizens from the unimaginable tortures that she herself escaped.

Choosing the medium of a screenplay, scriptwriter Heidi Kraay has melded her much-lauded lyrical style as the mortar between well-fired bricks of horror. Her scares are earned combining the visual poetry of the disturbing (fingers slowly crawling over the edge of a previously unoccupied bathtub, or a particularly nasty head tilt from Mrs. Lichter (Tracy Sunderland) or the way The One Who Cuts (Jz Marrero) playfully puppets the corpse of a recent victim, with a nuanced flavor of emotional trauma. The ghost girl squad live for the marriage between psychological and physical abuse from the petty to the extremely graphic.

Kraay has a good deal of compassion for her monsters and heroines both, investing time in their complex and often conflicting relationships: giving an enduring sweetness to potential victims (special note to Gretta (Hayden Pedersen) whose adventures with trying coffee for the first time in the midst of being haunted are dearly adorable). Joy benefits from Lo’s verklemptness and screaming silences that bursts into fountains of terror or rage. Richly plotted and teasing as it is, I will be intrigued to see how, not so much the lurking horror but the gossamer threads of time and relation, will translate to the screen. Still, I will not be sleeping well tonight.